No one in Germany was louder in his praises of the English sailors. He declared that they were his masters and his models. But, like the good German he was, he concealed, under the mask of admiration, a stubborn resolve to conquer them, to strip them of their insufferable superiority. The fleet that he was mustering was beyond all doubt an offensive weapon, an instrument fashioned with elaborate care for inflicting a deadly wound. Hostilities, however, have broken out sooner than he had foreseen or desired, and before he was ready for the attack. A few years more, and Tirpitz would assuredly have surprised his opponent with a war quite different from anything that the latter expected—a treacherous war of aeroplanes and submarines, which would have made up for his inferiority in numbers. The blockade of England, which he has tried to carry out to-day with inadequate means, enables us to gauge his audacity, as well as his utter lack of humanitarian scruples. What would have been the result of such a struggle under the sea, if the German effort had been backed by a patient and methodical preparation? Still, even if England had been vanquished, Germany would have been drawn into other naval wars. In the process of establishing her world-power, she would have had to force other rivals to lower their flag. It would have been essential for her to destroy the United States navy, in order to confine the Americans to the northern half of their continent, and to keep the markets of South America open exclusively to her own trade. After this, would she have been content to leave to the Japanese the mastery of the Pacific, and to be thwarted or driven out by them in the Far East? What a vista of conflicts for the organizer of the German navy, what a task for his own tireless energies and for those of his successors! Such are the inevitable results of the first step on the endless track of _Weltpolitik_.